The New York-based architect runs the firm with partners Ricardo Scofidio, Charles Renfro and Benjamin Gilmartin. Co-Founder Elizabeth Diller on the right. Photo: Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro
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Wed, Jul 03, 2019
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The annual Louis I. Kahn Award has been an important part of Philadelphia’s architectural landscape since 1983. This year’s event was held at the University of Pennsylvania’s Irvine Auditorium. The 2019 special honoree was the New York-based design/architecture firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Sponsored by AIA Philadelphia, Center for Architecture and Design, the sold-out crowd of hundreds lined up outside Irvine in what would become a precursor to another line: descriptions and images of the magnificent High Line in New York and Moscow, brought to you by the honorees.
Elizabeth Diller, who is married to Ricardo Scofidio (there are two other partners, Charles Renfro and Benjamin Gilmartin) was introduced by Robert Ivy, CEO of the American Institute of Architects. Diller’s inexhaustible verbal energy was evident from the moment she was introduced. But unless you have been following every development in the design and architectural world, you would not have necessarily known anything about the High Line except that it covers a large section of NYC where the meat packing industry used to be—in a place where, as Diller pointed out, there used to be a lot of sex work going on. After Diller’s comment, I could see that this wasn’t going to be your standard architecture lecture. Diller’s firm, after all, is multi-disciplinary and works on installation art, theater, digital media and print projects.
Diller, who co-founded the firm in 1981, is also a Professor of Architectural Design at Princeton. She originally wanted to pursue film studies but got into architecture serendipitously.
So, what’s a High Line anyway? NYC Parks describes it as “an elevated freight rail line transformed into a public park on Manhattan’s West Side. It is owned by the City of New York, and maintained and operated by Friends of the High Line.” Expanding on Diller’s statement, in the 1970s the area was considered a social/sexual sanctuary for people on the fringes of society.
A September of 2014 article in the New York Times, ‘The Climax in a Tale of Green and Gritty,’ explained: “If the newest, last stretch of the High Line doesn’t make you fall in love with New York all over again, I really don’t know what to say.” The elevated park has been described as “a heartbreaker,” swinging west on 30th Street from 10th Avenue toward the Hudson River, “straight into drop-dead sunset views. It spills into a feral grove of big-tooth aspen trees on 34th Street.”
The reviewer compared the High Line to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Spain. “It has spread a dream, albeit largely a pipe dream, around the world: how one exceptional design — in this case, a work of landscape architecture — might miraculously alter a whole neighborhood, even a whole city’s fortunes.”
In 1846 the area was home to the Hudson River Railroad with tracks running down 10th and 11th Avenues to a large terminal near Hudson Street. The trains were long then and clashed with crossing traffic. The Times reported that pedestrian deaths were common. There was a victim a year beginning in 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854 and 1855. One victim, it was reported, was “shockingly mangled.”
In Irvine Auditorium, Diller made some remarks on architecture in general. “Architects are control freaks,” she said, “but we can’t control our work after we finish a project. We control very little, ultimately.” She said how in 2004 the High Line was a mile and a half of industrial railroads. But even in its industrial incarnation it was already an iconic place. There was a High Line perfume that had “the scent of wildflowers and urban renewal.” The High Line area was the home of the topless Poets Society and for a brief time the scene of an open-air opera that took place high on the ledge of a tall building until the city said the unconventional stage was breaking the law. While going through the history of The High Line, Diller quickly segued and mentioned the Kavanagh hearings, the first political cue of the evening and pointing to where she stood on certain issues.
The most interesting part of the talk was how Diller Scofidio + Renfro beat out the competition to design a High Line in Moscow. Initially, Diller said there was some discussion within the firm about the wisdom of taking on a Russian project, given the current political climate. But good sense prevailed; the firm went forward and they found themselves the winner. The Russian victory was truly remarkable given the landscape change that would have to take place in Moscow before the project could be built.
The six thousand-bed Rossiya Hotel, just off Red Square in the old Jewish ghetto and built mainly to house Communist officials, had to be demolished. The hotel was already hopelessly out of date and falling apart, rife with cockroaches, bad food and (as Diller noted) “key ladies who spied on guests.” In the hotel’s main dining room there were elevators with doors that wouldn’t stop opening and closing. There were also loose and sometimes hanging wires in many of the hotel rooms, remnants perhaps of old Soviet spying days. Daily wake up calls consisted of matrons pounding on your door with their fists. The hotel had to be taken apart room by room. There was no demolition implosion because Moscow’s electrical grid and sewer lines lay beneath the structure, and then there was the question of the beautiful surrounding architecture such as Saint Basil’s cathedral.
Diller, in another political aside, said that President Vladimir Putin was so taken with the park’s beauty after the design became reality that he took immediate credit for its creation. A ripple of laughter shot through the audience when she said this, but afterwards I discovered that Putin had in fact ordered a park to be built back in 2012. Putin, I suppose, was taking credit for coming up with the idea.
The Moscow project was a world wide instant hit. CBS 3 commented:
“Filled with light and life, this park is a prime example of how much Moscow has changed. Two decades ago, the site was home to the hulking Rossiya Hotel – a Soviet landmark famous for its 3,000 drab rooms, and its cockroaches. Finally, in 2006 it was demolished. “
Diller Scofidio + Renfro worked with their Russian partners, Citymakers, to reinvent 32 acres covered in native plants and trees.
But in a sort of reversal of New York City’s High Line region which was formerly a shadowy lover’s paradise before the Diller Scofidio + Renfro transformation, Zaryadye, Moscow’s High Line, became an in your-face lover’s paradise after its transformation.
The Jewish Tablet reports that, “Zaryadye was so popular that it became a lover’s paradise which caused the City of Moscow some concerns. The former home of artisans, traders and fortunetellers, and the one time Jewish area of Moscow destroyed by Stalin, was now a green alterative to Red Square but in that context, it was being seen by some as being ‘almost too romantic.’”
Irony of ironies, New York and Moscow had traded places. One of Diller’s own screen projected images showed a couple getting married in Zaryadye park while two burly Russian men, face down on the grass beside the bridge and groom, slept off a horrendous drinking binge.
As for NYC’s High Line, Diller once said in an interview that, “We expected, conservatively, that 300,000 people would visit the High Line annually. It turned out last year to be six million and probably growing. What we’re seeing beyond the specifics of the High Line — we see it in museums today and all over — is that mass tourism has generated a handful of places that everyone feels very attracted to, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Met, as well as the High Line.”
“A lot of our work,” she added, “attempts to reread the past, to reinvent it. We’re not preservationists. We don’t believe in mummifying old structures. We do believe in breathing life into old things where we can. Sometimes it’s not possible. “
Elizabeth Diller, who is married to Ricardo Scofidio (there are two other partners, Charles Renfro and Benjamin Gilmartin) was introduced by Robert Ivy, CEO of the American Institute of Architects. Diller’s inexhaustible verbal energy was evident from the moment she was introduced. But unless you have been following every development in the design and architectural world, you would not have necessarily known anything about the High Line except that it covers a large section of NYC where the meat packing industry used to be—in a place where, as Diller pointed out, there used to be a lot of sex work going on. After Diller’s comment, I could see that this wasn’t going to be your standard architecture lecture. Diller’s firm, after all, is multi-disciplinary and works on installation art, theater, digital media and print projects.
Diller, who co-founded the firm in 1981, is also a Professor of Architectural Design at Princeton. She originally wanted to pursue film studies but got into architecture serendipitously.
So, what’s a High Line anyway? NYC Parks describes it as “an elevated freight rail line transformed into a public park on Manhattan’s West Side. It is owned by the City of New York, and maintained and operated by Friends of the High Line.” Expanding on Diller’s statement, in the 1970s the area was considered a social/sexual sanctuary for people on the fringes of society.
A September of 2014 article in the New York Times, ‘The Climax in a Tale of Green and Gritty,’ explained: “If the newest, last stretch of the High Line doesn’t make you fall in love with New York all over again, I really don’t know what to say.” The elevated park has been described as “a heartbreaker,” swinging west on 30th Street from 10th Avenue toward the Hudson River, “straight into drop-dead sunset views. It spills into a feral grove of big-tooth aspen trees on 34th Street.”
The reviewer compared the High Line to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Spain. “It has spread a dream, albeit largely a pipe dream, around the world: how one exceptional design — in this case, a work of landscape architecture — might miraculously alter a whole neighborhood, even a whole city’s fortunes.”
In 1846 the area was home to the Hudson River Railroad with tracks running down 10th and 11th Avenues to a large terminal near Hudson Street. The trains were long then and clashed with crossing traffic. The Times reported that pedestrian deaths were common. There was a victim a year beginning in 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854 and 1855. One victim, it was reported, was “shockingly mangled.”
In Irvine Auditorium, Diller made some remarks on architecture in general. “Architects are control freaks,” she said, “but we can’t control our work after we finish a project. We control very little, ultimately.” She said how in 2004 the High Line was a mile and a half of industrial railroads. But even in its industrial incarnation it was already an iconic place. There was a High Line perfume that had “the scent of wildflowers and urban renewal.” The High Line area was the home of the topless Poets Society and for a brief time the scene of an open-air opera that took place high on the ledge of a tall building until the city said the unconventional stage was breaking the law. While going through the history of The High Line, Diller quickly segued and mentioned the Kavanagh hearings, the first political cue of the evening and pointing to where she stood on certain issues.
The most interesting part of the talk was how Diller Scofidio + Renfro beat out the competition to design a High Line in Moscow. Initially, Diller said there was some discussion within the firm about the wisdom of taking on a Russian project, given the current political climate. But good sense prevailed; the firm went forward and they found themselves the winner. The Russian victory was truly remarkable given the landscape change that would have to take place in Moscow before the project could be built.
The six thousand-bed Rossiya Hotel, just off Red Square in the old Jewish ghetto and built mainly to house Communist officials, had to be demolished. The hotel was already hopelessly out of date and falling apart, rife with cockroaches, bad food and (as Diller noted) “key ladies who spied on guests.” In the hotel’s main dining room there were elevators with doors that wouldn’t stop opening and closing. There were also loose and sometimes hanging wires in many of the hotel rooms, remnants perhaps of old Soviet spying days. Daily wake up calls consisted of matrons pounding on your door with their fists. The hotel had to be taken apart room by room. There was no demolition implosion because Moscow’s electrical grid and sewer lines lay beneath the structure, and then there was the question of the beautiful surrounding architecture such as Saint Basil’s cathedral.
Diller, in another political aside, said that President Vladimir Putin was so taken with the park’s beauty after the design became reality that he took immediate credit for its creation. A ripple of laughter shot through the audience when she said this, but afterwards I discovered that Putin had in fact ordered a park to be built back in 2012. Putin, I suppose, was taking credit for coming up with the idea.
The Moscow project was a world wide instant hit. CBS 3 commented:
“Filled with light and life, this park is a prime example of how much Moscow has changed. Two decades ago, the site was home to the hulking Rossiya Hotel – a Soviet landmark famous for its 3,000 drab rooms, and its cockroaches. Finally, in 2006 it was demolished. “
Diller Scofidio + Renfro worked with their Russian partners, Citymakers, to reinvent 32 acres covered in native plants and trees.
But in a sort of reversal of New York City’s High Line region which was formerly a shadowy lover’s paradise before the Diller Scofidio + Renfro transformation, Zaryadye, Moscow’s High Line, became an in your-face lover’s paradise after its transformation.
The Jewish Tablet reports that, “Zaryadye was so popular that it became a lover’s paradise which caused the City of Moscow some concerns. The former home of artisans, traders and fortunetellers, and the one time Jewish area of Moscow destroyed by Stalin, was now a green alterative to Red Square but in that context, it was being seen by some as being ‘almost too romantic.’”
Irony of ironies, New York and Moscow had traded places. One of Diller’s own screen projected images showed a couple getting married in Zaryadye park while two burly Russian men, face down on the grass beside the bridge and groom, slept off a horrendous drinking binge.
As for NYC’s High Line, Diller once said in an interview that, “We expected, conservatively, that 300,000 people would visit the High Line annually. It turned out last year to be six million and probably growing. What we’re seeing beyond the specifics of the High Line — we see it in museums today and all over — is that mass tourism has generated a handful of places that everyone feels very attracted to, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Met, as well as the High Line.”
“A lot of our work,” she added, “attempts to reread the past, to reinvent it. We’re not preservationists. We don’t believe in mummifying old structures. We do believe in breathing life into old things where we can. Sometimes it’s not possible. “
